Ms Clare Duffy:

I thank Deputy Ó Cuív. I know from previous discussions with him that he knows carer's allowance inside out, and I respect that fully. In response to his first question - if the income disregard changed for carer's allowance, how many more people would be caught in the net - it is funny because Ms Keilthy and I were just talking before this meeting started about the difficulty capturing that type of information. To be honest, we do not know. What we do know, however, is that we have a scheme that is not means-tested and for which only full-time carers are eligible to apply, and that is the annual carer's support grant. We know that the total number of people who received that last year was 116,000 so we know it probably would not exceed that. At the minute we have 89,000 people in receipt of carer's allowance. Half of those, as I have already mentioned, are on a reduced rate because they have some other form of means.

That tells me at least half of those 89,000 people would benefit from an increase in the income disregard. We can take that cap as being the 116,000 people who get the annual carer's support grant but it is one for the Parliamentary Budget Office to figure out because we do not have the data. The Deputy's next question-----